So much for the temperate side of Islam. . .

A Christian mother living in Sudan, pregnant with her
second child, was sentenced to 100 lashes and death on Mother's Day for
adultery and apostasy, a persecution watchdog group revealed.

“We grieve today at the sentencing to
death of a mother, pregnant with her second child, for the expression of
her faith and legal marriage to a practicing Christian,” said
International Christian Concern Regional Manager William Stark.

“The handing down of such an extreme
punishment under a law inspired by the al-Turabi radicalism of the early
al-Bashir regime brings into question the direction Sudan intends to
head following South Sudanese succession. Having embraced policies of
Islamization and Arabization in the past, ICC fears Meriam could be the
first of many more Christians to suffer under an increasingly
radicalized Sudanese government intent on enforcing Shari’ah (Islamic)
law throughout the land.”

The woman, 27-year old Meriam Yahia Ibrahim,
received the sentencing on Sunday, when the U.S. celebrated Mother’s
Day. She appeared before El Haj Yousif Public Order Court in Khartoum,
Sudan.

ICC reported that Ibrahim was raised as an
Orthodox Christian, is a graduate of Khartoum University and was a
practicing MD. She married a South Sudanese Christian, Daniel Wani, but
since she was born in Sudan, a heavily Islamic country, she is
officially considered a Muslim, which makes her marriage to a non-Muslim
illegal in Sudan’s court system.

She has been kept at the Omdurman Federal
Women’s Prison with her 20-month-old son since Feb. 17, separate from
Wani. Ibrahim’s sentence is expected to be carried out following the
birth of her second child.

Christian aid agencies have been
helping followers of Christ flee persecution at the hands of the Islamic
government in Sudan, after South Sudan gained independence in 2011.
Barnabas Fund organized efforts in 2013 that helped 8,000 Christians
flee to safety into South Sudan but said that other Christians remain
stranded in Sudan.

“In the North the government is becoming
increasingly anti-Christian,” Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, the international
director of Barnabas Fund, said in an August 2013 interview with The
Christian Post.

“The North is heavily Sharia-based and
strongly anti-Christian. So we’ve got situations where women are
arrested for breaching Sharia law on dress, and can then be whipped and
imprisoned. That is a major problem,” he added, noting that a number of
Christian churches have been attacked as well.

Sudan underwent a major civil war between
1983 and 2005, which resulted in almost 2 million casualties, many of
whom were Christians from the South.

The United States Commission on International
Religious Freedom has also found President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s
Sudanese government to be guilty of “systematic, ongoing, and egregious
violations of freedom of religion or belief.”

And as much as I must conclude that the violent side of Islam must be the ordinary face of this religion, I find new questions about those liberals who claim to uphold rights but seem strangely silent when human rights violations such as this one are foisted upon Christians by Muslims....

4 comments:

You said, "Let me say that I want to believe that the fundamentalist radicals distort Islam, that temperate Islam is the norm, that the violence of Koran is a misreading. . ."

I believe that this is a fundamental error. We should not "want to believe" anything, but simply take the koran at its face value, along with the rules for its interpretation (specifically, later additions supersede earlier parts). With that approach, the koran is clearly a book of violence, advocating forced conversions and bloodshed, a book of coercion, and entirely the work of a morally depraved, mentally ill man (Mighty Mo), about a false god. "Wanting to believe" is entirely wrong when they tell us so clearly a message contrary to what we "want to believe."

Islam is a violent, theocratic political, religious and social system. It is spread through force, and even though many Muslims are individually peaceful, the percentage of violent extremists direct the religion, while moderates tread lightly to avoid being killed. To state some criticism of Islam, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, is to violate the Koran, along with many more infractions designed to suppress and dehumanize people. Christians, Jews, and Secular Muslims are the chief targets of Muslim extremists, but among themselves there is historical on-going bloodshed between Shia and Sunni forms of this religion. I for one see little co-existence possible, and believe if this nation had used our own oil resources, we would not be involved in that part of the world, making alliances with Arab countries which love money but hate the West. One of our so called allies, Saudi Arabia, has fronted money for terrorists throughout the world for decades, but our political amateurs invaded Iraq instead, and then Afghanistan, surely not an area desiring American style Jeffersonian Democracy.

The title of your entry suggests that Islam at one time did have a temperate side. Those of us who know history know that such has NEVER been the case. Those who follow the tenants of Islam are savage murdering thugs. The moderate Muslims are not Muslims. They are secularists who have some Muslim tendencies but that's it. Islam as practiced by the dictates of the Koran is charged to destroy anything unIslamic.

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